Colleen Kelly Mellor: None so lonely as a school principal

By Colleen Kelly Mellor

Thursday

Oct 31, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Every fall, around Halloween, I think of ghoulish beings — the kind who strike in the middle of the night. When I do, I’m not thinking of Stephen King’s fiction.I’m the daughter of a West Warwick High...

Every fall, around Halloween, I think of ghoulish beings — the kind who strike in the middle of the night. When I do, I’m not thinking of Stephen King’s fiction.

I’m the daughter of a West Warwick High School principal who was authoritative, in an age that still allowed that. My father used to stand before school assemblies where he’d issue directives to the student body for the weekend, such as: “Don’t go to Turcotte’s Hall after the game” (we were a big football town and we celebrated our gridiron victories). He worried student gatherings would run amok.

If he took the phrase “in loco parentis” (in the place of a parent) literally, it was understandable. Two of the gridiron greats were his sons. I was their younger sister. It was never easy, going to school where our dad was principal.

Kids at the assembly grumbled: “Who does Old Chrome Dome (he was bald) think he is, anyway, telling us what we can do on weekends?” I lowered my head and said nothing. I wasn’t a sports superstar.

As the years went by, my father faced increasing criticism for hard-line decisions. Two times especially stand out.

Some of the leaders of the football squad got rowdy one Friday night and peppered the teachers’ parking lot with broken glass. When my father identified the culprits, he benched the boys for two games — games that were important on our school’s march to division champs. The town went wild.

Parents took to the airwaves, calling the local radio station, accusing my father of being a tyrant. It was understandable: Fathers awaited each Saturday to relive their own youthful triumphs as gridiron greats through their sons. They reasoned: If their sons were punished, so were they.

People accosted my father on the street, to register their fury. Vendors refused to do business with us.

My father remained resolute.

Then Halloween came.

At 11 p.m., on that night of mayhem, the phone rang. It was an anonymous someone, telling my father: “Look outside your window, on your lawn.”

There, on a carefully maintained patch of grass, was an effigy of my father, complete with his trademark bow-tie, consumed in fire. We in the family watched in horror as flames licked up to the sky.

From that Halloween on, he positioned himself behind the hedges for hours, watching and waiting for offenders to reappear.

As if that weren’t creepy enough, it was followed years later by another.

Again, in the middle of the night, a noise shattered the silence, when a brick came through our dining room window. That sound was followed by an expletive-filled rant, directed at my father, as a car careened away, its tires screeching. It wasn’t exactly a “Mississippi Burning” event, but it registered always in my memory.

If those were the low points of his career as principal of our town’s only high school, there were other signs that demonstrated how lonely a principal can be. On most days, he had lunch with the building’s janitors, most likely reasoning it was easier that way. He was expert in programming and scheduling, while they oversaw the nuts and bolts of building maintenance. He knew there’d never be an awkward request by one of them in the presence of many.

He probably knew, too, that teachers preferred him absent from their brief time to socialize in their 20-minute lunch period. It’s generally the sole occasion where they give in to abandonment and shared hilarity, often letting the words fly. A principal present might be too risky.

School administrators shoulder an oftentimes impossible burden: Deliver a school that meets ever-more-challenging government mandates, in a milieu that resists change. Unlike other CEOs, they operate without the built-in buffer of a management/labor divide. They are all too accessible, many of them having been culled from the ranks of colleagues.

They answer to administrative higher-ups, building teachers and staff, and parents in the community. The best of them are hands-on and interactive with all.

Because of that, they walk a tightrope.

If they live in the communities whose schools they head, they’re “on” 24/7.

We’ve all heard the phrase “lonely at the top,” but as this child of an administrator knows: There’s none lonelier than the head of a school.

Their sole solace is that they set the tenor for the entire educational experience in their school. No small order in anyone’s educational book.

Colleen Kelly Mellor (ckmellor@cox.net), a former teacher with 30 years’ experience in the classroom, is a freelance writer who writes a blog at biddybytes.com, weighing in on life in Rhode Island and North Carolina.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.